The other day I went to install bidwatcher (ebay interface program). I stay on the 'stable' tree of portage. Unfortunately the version of bidwatcher available to me, 1.3.3, is completely broken. bidwatcher is a very version-sensitive program because it depends on the format of ebay's site. Often the latest version simply won't work if ebay has changed their site format in the meantime. In my case, I need bidwatcher 1.3.6 which is considered 'unstable'. I don't want to switch to unstable and I don't want to have to manually install bidwatcher.

I think packages that have such time constraints like this should be allowed special acceleration into the stable portage tree. Otherwise bidwatcher might as well just be taken out of stable portage because it's absolutely useless.

In fact, ironically it is broken in stable and working in unstable.

Carl_________________"It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws." - Theodore Roosevelt

If you are willing to install it simply by changing it from the category of unstable to stable (with no code changes), why not just install the 'unstable' version?_________________The First of April. The day when people critically evaluate information from the internet before accepting it as true.

I think if/when the enhancements described in Bug 3252: Portage RFE: "Sticky" USE settings are added to Portage, the state of the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS variables could be made sticky as well, which should solve this problem._________________For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder